Walter Swennen: free riding from WIELS to La Triennale

Virtually unknown in Italy, Belgian painter Walter Swennen is the protagonist of the current visual art exhibition at Triennale in Milan. Similar to what happened with Swennen’s compatriots de Gruyter & Thys, the duo of artists who will represent Belgium in the next Venice Biennale and had their first solo show in Italy also at Triennale last year, the Milanese institution has taken an interest in locally-yet-highly recognised Belgian art.

This trend at Triennale might as well be responsibility of Edoardo Bonaspetti, the curator of Swennen’s exhibition, and who was also involved as artistic director in the show of de Gruyter & Thys. We reached out to Bonaspetti a few days ago to ask a few questions about Swennen and the reception of his art in Italy. First we learned that Bonaspetti came across Swennen’s work right at the artist’s breakthrough retrospective at Brussels WIELS in 2013, arguably the one exhibition that turned Swennen into a favorite of Belgian critics, audience, and market.

Interestingly, Bonaspetti told us that despite the general public accessibility of painting, i.e., Swennen’s artistic medium of choice, the fact that this artist was so new to the Italian audience made him slightly worried about public reception. With some degree of surprise, this worry of his disappeared when the response of Milanese art lovers as well as collectors turned out to be above expectations.

Despite the fact that a few words have been spent about the ways in which Swennen’s artwork links to ideas from continental philosophy, or traditions in concrete poetry and conceptual art, we believe that the success of his paintings is rather due to how anarchic and mindless of theory and tradition they can be considered. In this regard, Swennen’s paintings came across to us as pleasant aesthetic objects, yet pleasant because of their total disregard for an underlying narrative that could encompass them all, and that could inflate them with meaning. If much contemporary visual art these days has a more or less hidden agenda, for example in terms of social engagement, contribution to an intellectual position, or even to art historical currents, Swennen’s paintings struck us for their total lack of rational planning. In a way, what we really enjoyed in the show was the slightly punk approach to art of this 70 year old painter from Brussels.

Swennen’s disregard for fixed canvas shapes and painting in series are examples of this attitude. In a recent interview given in the occasion of his solo show at Xavier Hufkens Gallery in Brussels, the painter seems to justify his dislike of formal constrains as a reaction to the “perverse effect that photography had on painting”, which for him has been responsible for painting in series and sticking to fixed canvas shapes. Even though one might be inclined to see Swennen as a painter who enjoys his freedom, in the same interview he is rather reluctant to talk about freedom, as he says that there are always constrains in respect to the material and previous choices made during the production of a painting. Of course we can advance no argument about Swennen’s own subjective experience in his studio, yet as spectators it is precisely a feeling of freedom and anarchy that we enjoyed in his artwork, and we cannot but agree with the interviewer Damien De Lepeleire when he claims that each of Swennen’s painting is an “adventure of its own”.

While enjoying Swennen’s disorderly practice, we started to wonder about the task of curating an exhibition of this kind, and we posed the question to Bonaspetti. His answer finally hinged on how the exhibition display could contribute to the feeling of each singular artwork: “the layout of the show attempted to reflect this richness of relations, compositions, decompositions, and apparent incoherences [of the paintings]”.

Back to Swennen’s painting in general, according to Bonaspetti, “beyond an apparent simplicity of some of Swennen’s artworks, after a careful look these works reveal their references to art history and a great expressive ability.” For Bonaspetti, “Swennen’s artwork is boldly free and it speaks about the dimension of the unconscious and nonsense.” This more conceptual and theoretical reading of Swennen’s artwork is indeed interesting and would deserve more space than the one this article can afford. From our point of view here however, we want to recommend Swennen’s exhibition not so much for its possible contribution to an intellectual discourse or art historical tradition, but rather with the hope that those readers who haven’t seen the show yet will enjoy its spirit of freedom.

As psychologist Daniel Kahneman has shown, our minds tend to look for, and come up with rational explanations even when there are none. In this regard, we took Swennen’s exhibition as an excuse to try to free ourselves from this cognitive bias, and we avoided making too much sense of his practice in philosophical or intellectual terms. This turned out to be an indeed refreshing aesthetic experience. After all, it might be true that, as Swennen gutsy says in his book Ne Quid Nimis, “the world makes no sense.”

As appendix to this article, we include some words that Walter Swennen sent us in response to a few of our questions about his painting. We asked him about the difference between drawing and painting, and how the experience of a painting changes when we talk about it. The poetic tone of his answers doesn’t allow for any cutting, hence below is the full text as we received it.

The painting is a Heraclitean boxing ring, frequented by couples of eternal champions, i.e., color and drawing, line and patch, edge and limit, painting and image… The image being always convertible into discourse, it is the domain where language reigns. The painting says nothing, it is inexpressible. “Language of painting” is a poetic license: only the pictures speak.

In the ring these great boxers come into contact, creating a zone of extreme turbulence and instability. It is the contact who directs the match. It’s a process where all things, thoughts, gestures, materials, bits of sentences, bits of images are inextricably linked to other things, themselves in constant modification, returning, breaking, resuming; it’s a chaotic and chancy adventure, where language is itself shredded into things in the process. It’s a job often long, interrupted and resumed, which occupies the whole of the present, so that it becomes untellable. But that’s what makes the painting what it is. Painting is an arrangement with chaos, onto which language, separating and ordering (and therefore judging), despairs of acting.

What I’m saying is that I feel like I’m lying. I’m not saying that I’m telling lies, that would be idiotic. I’m just saying that we’re not grasping the painting when we talk about it. To tell the story is a mental fabrication who can only find support in what, in the painting, is not inexpressible, in the forgetting of the process. So what I’m saying is that I feel like I’m lying, that the truth always escapes.

But we are all talking beings, which makes us a priori compulsive interpreters, making symbols out of everything. And I too talk.

August 29, 2018